Your Own Opera

 

  My first lover named his premier record album “Old Number One.” 

Decades after being divorced from a different man—I still refer to my ex-husband as “old number one”. First attempts at love and marriage have no guarantees. Both events broke my heart—one in a year and the other took 12 years.

        I said they broke my heart, but I know it takes two people to fall into and out of love… and some part of loving never goes away. Life is never as easy as breaking someone’s heart . It takes two to break a heart . So much for the soothing salve of self pity. 

       I was Mrs. Paul Conrad Johnson, half of a folk/jazzy musical duo named PJ and Amy—later called Avalon. We mistook our great love for the music as a great passion for each other. 

       I don’t buy into re-running regrets. Feeling loved and giving love will always be magical. That first marriage helped me carve out who I wanted to be in this life. And after a few years of living alone in the woods, I discovered things that I truly loved in myself and in others.  Curiosity, creativity, courage…tenacity.

        Houston,TX, in the ’60s  was a hotbed for songwriters and folksingers, literally and figuratively. Because there were few women songwriting performers, I filled a niche.

Peter Gardner had a weekly radio, “The Sampler”, he taped in his dining room. I can still smell the cigarettes and the aroma of spilled wine. The room was filled each week with locals and musicians traveling through town. The program rang with everything from banjos to bagpipes and tons and tons of brand new folk songs.

         We all played Sand Mountain Coffee House, the Jester, the Jewish Family Center, and miscellaneous churches that had coffee houses.

       Janis Joplin, Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes van Zandt, Gary White, KT Oslin, Frank Davis,…..John Denver—we all gathered at gigs and stayed up long hours after the establishments closed—in living rooms, back porches, and parking lots.

      Whether on cheap wine, marijuana, or delta momma, we’d leave the  reel-to-reel recorder running for hours as we went around the circle singing songs and telling stories. 

        For one whole season, I was the house entertainer at the Jester four nights a week. I played all original tunes, worked at Rice University in an endocrinology lab, and took my lunches with Guy Clark in the upstairs flat he shared with Gary White—who wrote Linda Ronstadt’s hit “Long Long Time.”

        When I did marry, I married someone of different basic ethics than mine. I believed that I’d said “I do” and had to make the best of it—for the duration. He didn’t. I feared being abandoned. He was tormented by the idea of staying static. It was one of those blessings disguised as grand opera—a tragedy.

        Life’s like that reel-to-reel tape recorder—turned on and running without stop. But I’m not telling you anything. You had a first love and maybe an old number one. I hope you have weathered well the overtures and arias of your own opera.